This application relates to beverage container carriers, and in particular to a planar carrier for use in conjunction with heavy and large (i.e., 2- and 3-liter) glass or plastic bottles, such as soda bottles.
Beverage bottlers, such as bottlers of Coke.RTM., Pepsi.RTM., 7-Up.RTM. and the like generally deliver beverage bottles to grocery stores in trays. These trays of bottles are then stacked one-on-top of the other, and consumers remove the bottles from the tray for purchase. The bottles are often grouped together in multi-pack carriers, such as four-packs, six-packs and the like.
There are numerous types of multi-pack carriers which fall into three categories: (1) basket-type carriers, (2) box-top or sleeve carriers, and (3) planar carriers. For instances such as noted above, basket-type carriers are not useable. Additionally, they are complex and required complex folding and gluing machinery to covert a blank to a basket carrier. Box-top or sleeve carriers are much easier to fold from a blank and are much less expensive to produce than basket carriers. However, planar carriers use even less material than box-top carriers, and thus are less expensive to manufacture than box-top carriers. It would be desirable to provide a planar carrier which has high planar strength so that it can be used to handle multi-packs of large, heavy bottles.